Catalog Printing and Distribution

We have a customer that is a wholesale distributor of pond supplies. A large part of their marketing budget is printing and distribution of an annual catalog.

Printing – Before we got involved, our customer dutifully checked print pricing every year with at least 3 printers and thought their costs were in line. What they didn’t realize is that catalog printing, like many printed products, is highly specialized.

At McNeal we went to work checking prices with our trusted catalog printers and we were able to reduce catalog printing costs from $ 30,000 per year to about $ 20,000. In addition they got a better quality product (including UV coating and perfect binding) delivered in half the time.

Catalog Distribution – The pond supplies business gets slow in the winter so the customer was using employee downtime to stuff, address and mail catalogs. It seems like a good idea but it was taking a long time to get the catalogs mailed, and they were unaware that presorted mailing could save them thousands of dollars in postage.

We showed them that spending a few hundred dollars to have catalogs addressed, sorted and delivered to the Post Office in bulk would save them thousands in postage and get catalogs in the mail in 2 days instead of weeks.

Added benefit: In recent years the company had found it increasingly difficult to get pricing from suppliers in time to get catalogs printed and to customers in time for the heavy spring sales season. By dramatically reducing printing and mailing times, our customer can now easily beat the season.

Mailing List – In the process of working with the customer on mailing we realized that they were using an outdated prospecting list. We helped them obtain a current, specifically targeted list that has helped them maximize returns from their catalog mailings.